Political Correctness is Good

Gal Uchovsky says that sometimes it’s better to shut up then to say things that can hurt other people. This is why being politically correct is a good thing.

So what did we have this week? Let’s summarize:
1. An advertisement in “Be’emunah” (”In Faith”) featuring a religious residential neighborhood, without primitive Mizrahi Jews.
2. ”Sabbath Square News” published a ruling by Rabbi Zion Boaron that one cannot trust an Arab doctor because he is the enemy.
3. Website “Srugim” (‘knitted’) published an article about Hanukkah being the solution to AIDS, and explained why black people in Africa, who have no values, suffer the most.
4. On Channel 2 News Rabbi Kanievski said that women studying in academic institutions is worse than the furnaces at Auschwitz.

What do all these wonderful events have in common? The fact that they are not subjected to political correctness. The makers of the video, news editors on both sites, and of course the rabbis – none of them thinks he should use political correctness before he opens his cesspool. It comes to them – they say it.

In recent years, it is customary to belittle this matter of political correctness. But the chain of events of the past week (and this is without saying a thing about the legal actions of MK Yinon Magal) reminds me that political correctness is a requirement. It’s time to exert more pressure in these matters.

I could write here that all the people I mentioned are a bunch of failing, primitive Neanderthals. I could say they don’t deserve any official support by the state, and I could even reply to the decisiveness of the late Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and his daughter (may she live a long life) Adina Bar Shalom, and then I would be accused of hatred of the ultra-Orthodox or something. But there’s no need. I have no hatred for the ultra-Orthodox or religious people of any kind; I just think they are being forgiven too easily. To ask them to change laws may be difficult, and to keep our mouths shut is a little easier. Maybe they should be required to catch up and learn that the world may have been created in seven days, but since then a few things have happened.

And we need to pay attention to them. Why does a respected rabbi like Rabbi Zion Boaron, whose salary I’m paying, think he’s allowed to talk like that about physicians and nurses who are Arab and who work in Israeli hospitals? Where did that guy get the chutzpah to attack those people who work so hard and with such dedication, people who everyone who has been in a hospital in the last year in Israel received treatment from?

Too bad you can not mark the whole community and family of this rabbi and make sure that in the next month no Arab will agree to take care of them in a hospital. And also, why these Arabs, who are citizens of Israel, will, with the taxes they pay, fund this man’s huge salaries that he gets from the rabbinical court and as a head of a synagogue. And he probably has other incomes. Arab citizens of Israel, with blue identity cards, who live as it is in an almost impossible reality…why shouldn’t public figures, journalists and news websites be careful not to hurt their dignity?
It is almost pathetic. Every high school kid knows that you don’t need to study in a university to know that the AIDS epidemic in Africa is a primarily result of poverty, lack of drugs and illiteracy. It doesn’t have anything to do with a life of debauchery. If all the money given to yeshiva students would be transfered as a contribution to, let’s say, Zambia, the level of HIV infections could be shortened in a small amount of time. But what’s more interesting is that in this didactic article, that goes against wild sex and tattoos, there is a great deal of caution in matters of the LGBT community. The community is casually mentioned only once in the following passage: “AIDS is distributed mainly due to replacement of partners or having casual relations, not to mention same-sex relations. The second way is through needles used for injecting drugs or drawing tattoos and passed on from person to person.”
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Please note that this Yoeli person may be ready to attack secular society and of course the leftists, but he’s very careful about accusing homosexuals of spreading AIDS. And why? Because he learned with his new senses that you don’t mess with the gays . He learned that he should be careful and use formulations that are more politically correct. In fact I had to read the article twice in order to get the absurd sentence that same-sex relations are sweepingly causing AIDS.
To me, it is rather optimistic. This means there’s still hope. This means we have to fight with all our force dealers like Israel Zeira, who’s not only CEO of the fabulous construction company “Be’emunah,” but also a member of the Board of “Tkumah” of the Jewish Home party. More importantly, we must go back and say out loud that political correctness is a good thing. And it should be standard practice. Because women, Arabs, Mizrahi and gay people are not suckers for any idiot who thinks he can just say unbearable things about them.

A Wider Bridge is a North American organization working through education, advocacy, relationship-building and grant-making to create equality in Israel by expanding LGBTQ inclusion in Israel, and equality for Israel by cultivating constructive engagement with Israel.

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